How a Soundtrack That Never Materialized Resulted In a Personal Art Boom
What the fuck even is "Magical Insurance Bureaucrats" anyway?
Compilation of a bunch of the art - this is my "tone piece" for the project more or less
For a while now, I've been working on this thing called The Ongoing Adventures of Magical Insurance Bureaucrats in a World Recovering from a Failed Alien Invasion (a mouthful, but at least I'm true to myself) and when people ask me what it is, I don't really have a good answer.
Wait what do you mean by that lmao
This whole thing started as a seemingly simple songwriting exercise back in 2019: "score a non-existent game for practice". And well, me being me, I found ways to over-engineer this pretty much from the fucking beginning.
As a lover of rolling randomized restrictions, I tossed a bunch of topics and words into RNG and what I got from it for the fake game I'd be writing music for was this:
Frontier Airship Armadillo, an early PlayStation-era low budget adventure game that was never released outside of Japan, but got a bootleg translation patch and popularity boom in Brazil ten years after release (and was only ever playable in English via Portuguese translation patches and emulation).
Yea. I know. I KNOW.
Again, that could have been enough for me to go with but fuck me; I felt I needed to understand the (as of that moment, non-existent) story better. This resulted in jotting down a series of random bits of microfiction, plot ideas, character profiles, short stories etc that helped flesh out the world I was writing the music for - which got me to a track list:
Now, completely unrelated to the above project, by mid 2020 I was spending a good chunk of my not-sleeping time learning Blender via Youtube on a whim1 because I had a newborn kitten who was actively boycotting sleep unless it was on my lap and I was sitting upright. There wasn't ever a consideration for the learning of Blender or my various little Unity test projects being related to this Armadillo thing, but the more I started randomly sketching out and concept-arting the characters and locations for the fake game on paper, the more I realized I could probably do some of that in 3D, right?
And that was huge in kicking off a mad descent into my "visual artist" phase.
To back up a bit, I'm a photographer, sure - but I'd never considered myself a visual artist in that way; not as a slight against photography, but in that from an identity standpoint I've always been a musician first if that makes sense? However the more I messed around with Blender, the more I got serious about drawing, about composition, about a lot of things I kinda took for granted.
How it started; sketching out a "bird wizard" in 2021
How it's going; a fully realized protagonist with a goddamn mission (and some sassy employer's commentary)
...and hilariously, everything I made in Blender looked "too 3D" for what I was going for outside of like, backgrounds. If I based something around a 3D model I always liked the result better if I re-drew it or painted it myself...so more drawing and painting entered my life with 3D being a helpful addition to the toolset - not the primary vessel.
So at this point, I've evolved into that dude who didn't wanna use drum samples and now raises sheep: I've not touched the music on this project for well over a year and instead here I am tackling my personal "final boss"; short animations using a mix of the drawing, the painting and the 3D art in concert with each other:
Mix of 3D rendered backgrounds, hand drawn animation and digital painting. For a version with less compression, click here
TLDR: When I say I make mixed-media art about bird wizard bureaucrats, I'm really not kidding lmfao. This project truly is the beast to cover all the angles.
March 2019, a quick sketch of the "Ithara Frozen Jungle" in my Techo
Ithara brought to life
So where does that leave us? I still don't know, man! If I had unlimited time and budget I would love to create a game or a short film in this world with these characters but for now - you're gonna have to settle for snippets of microfiction and art (I recommend going in post order starting from oldest) about Tamm's misadventures and the endless oversight of their boss at the Salvage Insurance Bureau here on the blog.
Anyway, here's a preview of some of the characters. As you can see, I'm asking the important questions like, "what if birds were people but had antlers and bureaucracy"
I love this gang and even if their adventures are incongruous and not necessarily "audience friendly" yet, it's a great creative outlet for me if nothing else!
Highly recommend Grant Abbit, by the way. Fuck the donut guy and his constant bullshit (being nostalgic for homophobic slurs, pivot to NFTs, pivot to AI, etc etc)↩